The purpose of this article is to describe and document the nascent state of hospitality in colonial Victoria from the 1830s until the gold rushes of the 1850s. The primary source of such an account is the personal journal of a public servant, George Augustus Robinson, the Chief Protector of the Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate Department, perhaps the European with the most experience of travelling throughout the Port Phillip District. Accounts from other contemporary sources are used to complement Robinson's observations. Where accommodation houses were available, they were often crude establishments offering poor fare for travellers. The most comfortable accommodation was to be had on squatting runs, some of which had purpose-built huts for travellers. In some cases, hospitality meant sleeping with strangers, sharing beds with one other occupant or sleeping on shakedowns or mattresses on floors with numerous people. However, beyond the limits of settlement, travellers had to make their own arrangements, utilising abandoned Aboriginal shelters or shepherd huts, pitching their own tents, or simply sleeping on the ground wrapped in a blanket using a saddle or a log for a pillow.

Careers in the tourism industry are relatively new phenomena and have not been the subject of extensive research. Yet, it is clear from the little research that is available that high levels of mobility and unclear career paths stigmatise tourism careers. These issues focus highly in the new ‘boundaryless’ career that has received much attention in human resources research recently. Mentoring has been portrayed as a useful tool to help employees cope with this new career environment. To test this premise, 23 managers in the industry were interviewed and told their own ‘career story’. Respondents reported frequent intra-company, inter-company, and inter-industry career moves and rated mentoring programs as a powerful career management tool. These findings have implications for policy development within the industry and for those seeking a career in tourism. Those involved with other new and emerging professions with find this article of interest.

This study was conducted to explore leisure motivations with regard to tourist attractions. A survey of a convenience sample of residents of Melbourne, Australia, was conducted. The sample was then segmented based on the likelihood of visiting a cross-section of Melbourne's tourist attractions in the next 6 months. Analysis using Unger and Kernan's (1983) Subjective Leisure Scale (SLS) was then undertaken to explore whether there were differences across the segments in terms of their leisure motivations. The results highlight that, within this context, intrinsic satisfaction, perceived freedom and arousal emerged as stronger underlying dimensions of motivations to visit tourist attractions, rather than mastery, spontaneity and involvement. This information provides insights for marketers of tourist attractions with regard to what residents are seeking when they visit local tourist attractions. The information can be used to develop more positive experiences at tourist attractions for this important sector of the market.

This article addresses the nature of skills in international hospitality. Frequently characterised as ‘low skills’, it is increasingly recognised that skills bundling in services such as hospitality cannot be solely seen in terms of the technical attributes of work. Emotional and aesthetic dimensions have been added to the services skills bundle. The added dimension of Pine and Gilmore's ‘experience economy’ suggest a further component within this bundle, namely that of experience skills. This article explores the role of experiential factors in helping to equip those entering work in the international hospitality industry. The learning demands of the sector for those brought up in a western, developed world environment are relatively small, primarily reflecting the strongly Americanised operating culture of hospitality. In addition, those working in hospitality in most developed countries have experience of the sector as both consumers and employees. By contrast, employees in international hospitality in less developed countries do not have similar benefits of experience, either though general acculturation or as consumers of hospitality services. This divergent experience profile has significant implications for the skills demands of hospitality work and leads to the proposition that experience is an important factor in determining the skills demands of hospitality work. This, in turn, leads to this article's proposal that Experiential Intelligence (ExQ) is an indicator of this difference in terms of workplace skills

In recognition that they largely control the context in which legalised gambling is operated, state governments in Australia have taken an increasingly active role in encouraging the gambling industry to implement responsible gambling practices. In the state of Queensland, the government introduced the voluntary Queensland Responsible Gambling Code of Practice in May 2002. This article reports part of a larger study investigating gambling providers' awareness of this Code, their implementation of its provisions and their views on its likely effectiveness in hotels, casinos and clubs in certain case study areas in remote, regional and urban Queensland. This article draws only on data for the selected regional area, Townsville. Semistructured interviews with managers and staff in 12 venues revealed mixed awareness of the Code, limited implementation of its component elements and variable support for its likely effectiveness. However, a committed group of five venue managers was much more proactive in implementing the Code than those in the remaining venues and much more supportive of its potential effectiveness. These five venues — two clubs, two hotels and the casino — subsequently formed a responsible gambling consultative committee, a regional network initiated by the local Centacare welfare agency. The experience of this committee points to numerous benefits that such a network can provide in addressing regional challenges regarding responsible conduct of gambling. As such, this study highlights some of the possible facilitators and challenges in implementing responsible gambling practices in regional areas, particularly those with similar characteristics to Townsville.

This article examines the relationships between heritage tourism and shopping. It considers two towns — Castlemaine and Maldon — which were established in the Australian Gold Rushes of the 1850s. Both towns feature relatively intact 19th century streetscapes and mining areas. They are also vibrant tourist shopping areas, including restaurants, cafes, antiques shops, galleries and craft shops. Drawing on evidence from a 2-year study of visitors, it is argued the combination of shopping and heritage is attractive to tourists and that many tourists engage in both. Furthermore, it is argued that while heritage attracts visitors, the economic benefits are captured by restaurants, cafes and shops.

Given the increasing arrivals of international tourists to Malaysia, this research assessed the expectations and perceptions of service quality in Malaysia's hotels by applying a modified version of the SERVQUAL model. Comparisons among Malaysian hotel guests, hotel guests from other Asian countries, and non-Asian hotel guests were undertaken. The findings indicated, as a whole, that the hotel guests' perceptions of service quality provided by the hotel industry were lower than their expectations. The lowest expectations and perceptions were given by Malaysian hotel guests towards the hotels in Malaysia. Between Malaysian hotel guests and hotel guests from other Asian countries, there was no significant difference in the overall satisfaction levels for the sample as a whole. However, between Malaysian hotel guests and non-Asian hotel guests, the results showed that the overall customer satisfaction levels towards the hotel stay was significantly different for the sample as a whole.

This article summarises a case study investigating the relationship between a disastrous forest fire and the local tourism industry. During the summer of 2003, the region of Kelowna in British Columbia experienced an unusually severe forest fire that required evacuation of over 26,000 people, destroyed 238 private homes, caused a major disruption of the region's main tourism season, and destroyed several major tourism attractions. A case study was undertaken to examine how prepared Kelowna's tourism industry was for such a disaster, how the tourism industry responded to the disaster, what impact the disaster had on the different sectors of the tourism industry, and what lessons were learned. A survey of 104 local tourism businesses was conducted, as well as a review of government and organisational reports and the analysis of 175 media articles covering the fire. This article highlights some of the findings.

This article investigates how in-flight service, reservation and ticketing, airport service, reliability, employee service, flight availability, passenger satisfaction, pricing (value), and airline image determine passengers' future behavioural intentions. For this testing, structural equation modelling was applied to data collected from Australian domestic air passengers. It was found that there were significant relationships between the variables, except in four paths. In-flight service and employee service were found as significant drivers of passenger satisfaction, which was directly related to pricing (value), airline image, and passengers' future behavioural intentions.

In the past two decades, there have been 76 published articles that have segmented tourist samples into clusters (Jackson, Inbakaran, & Schmierer, 2003). The principal aims of such research are to better understand tourist characteristics, to identify key variables that predict tourist behaviours, to assess the value of tourism to an area, to provide knowledge to help develop facilities in designated areas, and to allow tourism marketing to plan strategies such as promotion and product development. In contrast, researchers have appeared to assume that the host population is homogeneous and has a uniform response to an increase in tourist numbers and to future sustainable tourism within the community. This research study used a cluster analysis to segment the host community into four cluster groups. Demographic variables constituted the cluster base. These four cluster groups differed from each other on gender ratio, age, life cycle stage, education, migration status, occupation and current involvement with tourism. A further analysis demonstrated that these cluster groups significantly differed from each other in terms of both attitude towards current tourist numbers and future tourism development. The results of this study are discussed in terms of exploring the underlying causes of both positive and negative attitudes of hosts toward tourism. This research highlights differing attitudes present in various community groups and explores implications for the tourist industry.

The research reported in this article explores why consumers choose to book their travel arrangements with travel agencies in regional settings. Consumers can now access online bookings for airlines, accommodation, transportation, sightseeing tours and other related products, so why do they still go to travel agencies for reservations? This article identifies the attributes consumers seek in a travel agency or consultant and determines the relative importance of these in their selection process. The research was conducted in two stages. The first stage was a series of in-depth interviews with 10 travel agency users and three travel consultants. The second stage was a mail-out survey of 400 users of travel agencies in the Darling Downs area of Queensland, Australia. Despite its regionality, the region is a significant consumer of travel with approximately eight agencies in the city of Toowoomba alone. The in-depth interviews highlighted the need to de-emphasise two particular agency attributes, agency promotion and adequate brochure provision, from the research questions and replace these with parking and travel reward programs as factors worthy of investigation. Survey results revealed that there were 12 significant attributes impacting on consumer selection and, of these, the most important were the knowledge and experience of consultants, and the helpfulness and friendliness of consultants. Of particular note was that these attributes related to the consultant and not the agency per se. Travel reward programs were seen as the least influential in this research.

Tertiary providers of hospitality management degree programs must fulfil the needs of student, industry and academic stakeholder groups. The students attracted to this type of program tend to be motivated primarily by the anticipated vocational outcomes. As a result, hospitality management curriculum needs to meet both industry and student expectations by delivering the skill sets needed in the workplace and the institutional demands for academic rigour. This article reports on research that aimed to compare hospitality managers' expectations of graduate skills with student perceptions of the skills that hospitality managers valued. In contrast to previous research on this topic, this study adopted a generic skills framework and managers rated skills associated with interpersonal, problem-solving, and self-management skill domains as most important. Although students tended to rate conceptual and analytical skills more highly than did managers, overall their perceptions of the skills that hospitality managers valued when recruiting graduates were realistic. The results of this, and similar studies, can contribute to curriculum design and the internal and external communications strategies adopted by faculty offering hospitality management programs.

The debate over the adequacy of competency-based training (CBT) to meet the needs of service industries is far from over. In Australia, the national training package qualifications (which are CBT based) are well entrenched, with competency elements growing like bacteria on a buffet. Developed by industry for industry, this framework appears to have had little impact on training practices in the workplace. Enterprise training is not linked to the National Training Framework (Smith, Oczkowski, Noble, & Macklin, 2002). In colleges, atomistic customer service outcomes delivered in standardised, context-free conditions do little to meet the needs of service industries, tourism and hospitality in particular. Sociocultural approaches point to the context embeddedness of workplace learning, including the diversity of social interactions within the organisation and with customers. The industry is also a dynamic one, with ongoing changes to the tourism product (which includes service) to meet increasingly sophisticated expectations. Customers, including international visitors whose contribution is one of the country's largest sources of foreign income exchange, are looking for unique and culturally authentic experiences. Curriculum reform is an urgent priority if vocational training in colleges and workplaces is going to meet the emerging needs of this competitive services sector.

As many hotels have started implementing wireless networks to support a wide variety of business processes, others have followed suit in order to match the competitor's service offerings. Thus, although the adoption of wireless technologies is in many instances based on a bandwagon effect (Wolff, 2003), there are a number of factors potentially influencing the decision of whether or not to implement wireless technologies in hotel properties. This article provides an overview of the use of this technology in the hotel industry, identifies social, technical, and organisational factors influencing adoption decisions, and establishes a cost-theoretic model to analyse adoption decisions. The cost-analytic framework extends the theoretical underpinnings by creating a decision schedule to map the direct and indirect (non-linear) effects surrounding the evolving trend towards introducing wireless Internet access in hotels. The framework allows managers to objectively trace the economic net-present-value of their technology investment decisions. The cost-analytic model implicates adoption thresholds related to technology costs and setup-indirect effects that can mar direct positive effects of technical, organisational, and social antecedents.

A range of stakeholders should inform planning processes if these processes are to be consistent with best practice principles. This article examines the case of the Twelve Apostles Visitor Centre, a tourism development proposed to be located in a National Park in Victoria, Australia. Limited opportunities were provided for meaningful stakeholder input during the planning phase. Despite the prevailing view among all major parties that some development of facilities would be appropriate, an absence of genuine consultation was experienced prompting a substantial redesign of the development concept as originally conceived (in 1996) and project delays which postponed the commencement of the development into 2000 by which time a new state government was in place.

This article unpacks the content of Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) in the hospitality industry and makes a comparison with collective agreements that have been negotiated in the industry. The article reveals that, in the hospitality industry, AWAs are minimal documents when compared to collective agreements, with AWA employers achieving wages and hours flexibility at the expense of employee entitlements. The lack of innovative provisions in AWAs suggests that, in an industry where low labour costs have a significant impact on the organisation's bottom line, there is a temptation for employers to use AWAs to decrease these costs as much as possible. There is little evidence of AWAs being used for alternate purposes — to foster positive employee relations, or to encourage and reward employees for good performance. Whether this approach will benefit the industry in the longer term is questionable. However, with the simplified agreement making process that was introduced through the Work Choices amendments to the Workplace Relations Act 1996, it is suggested that AWAs will become an even more attractive form of employment for hospitality employers.